SOURCE: Ziolkowski, Eric J. “Don Quijote's Windmill and Fortune's Wheel.” Modern Language Review 86, no. 4 (October 1991): 885-97

The knight's combat with the windmills in Part i, Chapter 8, of Don Quijote de la Mancha (1605) is the most famous episode in what many view as the first and prototypical modern novel, a work that has been the most widely translated, published, read, and discussed text of that genre in literary history. By the time Miguel de Cervantes wrote the Quijote's second part (1615) he was evidently aware that the windmill adventure was the most favoured of all from the first part. Early in the sequel, when Don Quijote asks the bachelor Sansón Carrasco which of his adventures have become the most famous (‘las que más se ponderan’),¹ the first one Carrasco mentions is that of the windmills. Later, as the mad knight prepares to do battle with a caged lion, his terrified squire entreats him to abandon that enterprise which seems to dwarf even the windmill adventure (‘en cuya comparación habían sido tortas y pan pintado la de los molinos de viento’ (ii, p. 387)).

Notwithstanding the perennial popularity of the windmill adventure from Cervantes's time to our own, and the conventional definition of quijotismo or quixotism as tilting at windmills, scholars and critics have reached no consensus about this adventure's significance. The question remains today: what, if anything, is the windmill meant to represent? During the last fifty years, while some have viewed it in general terms as representing ‘grey everyday reality’ (die graue Alltäglichkeit)² or the modern technological domination of nature,³ others have seen it more specifically as a metaphorical allusion to the principle of evil in Jewish mysticism,⁴ the Cyclops in the third book of Virgil's Aenid,⁵ the Cross of Christ,⁶ the classical theory of the cyclic beginning of things which Augustine attacks in Book xii of De Civitate Dei,⁷ or the giants whom Dante likens to the towers of Montereggioni in Canto xxxi of the Inferno.⁸

Despite such remarkably diverse interpretations, almost four centuries of Quijote criticism have failed to uncover one of the most revealing implications of the windmill the knight attacks: its satiric embodiment of the wheel of Fortune, a concept which finds its origin in Greek and Roman Antiquity, and becomes a stock image in medieval and Renaissance literature. Although it has passed unnoticed until now, this linkage is consistent with Américo Castro's observation that to the Spaniard of Cervantes's day, ‘the supernatural and the natural, the religious and the profane, the spiritual and the physical, the abstract and the concrete, coexisted in one and the same unit of consciousness’.⁹ According to Castro this explains Cervantes's habit of ‘linking in a single expressive unit the mention of a physical and of a psychic ideal object’ (for example, ‘dejé la casa y la paciencia’ (i, p. 163)), a literary-linguistic phenomenon which, having begun in the Middle Ages, becomes ‘the epitome of the conception of man upon which Don Quixote is based’.¹⁰ This tendency of conjoining physical and psychic objects is taken one step further in the windmill adventure, where an abstract concept (wheel of Fortune) manifests itself in a concrete structure (windmill). Notwithstanding the Quijote's just reputation as a pioneer text in the development of modern realism, Cervantes's use of the windmill image recalls the fantastic illustrations of Fortune's wheel by medieval artists, who, according to Emile Mâle, ‘took everything in a literal sense and loved to clothe the most abstract thought in concrete form’.¹¹

The implicit association of windmills and the wheel of Fortune in Don Quijote finds an explicit precedent in Le Mireour du monde, a fourteenth-century manual of instruction on the biblical commandments and various vices and virtues. In the section concerning ‘La quarte branche principal d'Orguel’, which is folebaerie or ambition, it states: ‘Se nos regardons ces citès, ces tours, ces Eglyses cathédraux, ces abbayes royaux, où dame fortune est qui tourne plus tost ce dessous-dessus que molin à vent.’¹² While there is no reason to suspect that Cervantes knew this passage or even the book in which it occurs, it demonstrates how readily the association between windmills and Fortune's wheel could occur to someone living when both were still in wide use, the one as an industrial machine primarily for grinding grain, the other as a philosophical concept and literary image. Indeed, by Cervantes's time that association had apparently been assimilated into the vast body of popular proverbs which Don Quijote's squire is so fond of reciting. For it is a piece of local wisdom (‘lo que se dice por ahí’) that Sancho Panza invokes when, in commenting on his master's captivity in a cage on an ox-cart, he affirms that ‘la rueda de la Fortuna anda más lista que una rueda de molino’ (i, p. 280). The explicit link between the two types of rueda in this terse saying makes all the more compelling the identical connexion I am suggesting between Fortune's wheel and the windmill attacked by Don Quijote.

Before examining that connexion, I shall address the problem of how and why it might have come to suggest itself in the first place. To answer this question it is necessary first to take into account not only the history of the concepts and depictions of Fortune, Fortune's wheel, and the wind of Fortune prior to the Renaissance, but also the introduction of windmills to western Europe (in the late twelfth century) as highly visible machines energized by the revolving, wheel-like motion of spoked sails fortuitously blown by the wind.

The Castilian terms fortuna, destino, suerte, and ventura, which recur frequently throughout the Quijote's narrative, refer to ‘la causa incógnita que se cree presidir al éxito de las cosas’, with their subtle distinctions being summed up as follows: ‘La ventura hace, la fortuna quiere ó exige, la suerte decide, el destino ordena.’¹³ The idea of a capricious force that influences human affairs derives in part from the Latin notion of fortuna. Formed from the word for luck (fors), and more or less synonymous with the Greek tyche, this term denotes fortune, luck, or chance, though it is often confused with fate (fatum).¹⁴ It is surmisable that the concept of Fortune's wheel, the most familiar of her symbolic attributes in literature and art, originated when the image of the wheel as representing the idea of variation and vicissitude became joined in the popular imagination with the truism that a person's mood or luck in life can turn at any moment, for better or worse.

Scholars have often tried to locate the earliest references to a wheel of Fortune in either Roman or medieval literature. However, the idea seems to have originated among the Greeks, to whom the idea of a wheel (kuklos) of human affairs was familiar (for example, in Herodotus). The figure of Fortune's wheel first appeared in Pindar's second Olympian ode as one of his eternal ideas, and recurs in certain works of Sophocles and Hippodamus, the Pythagorean, before being passed on to the Romans.¹⁵ Among the latter, whose worship of Fortuna as a goddess was patterned after the Greek cult of the goddess Tyche, the rota Fortunae ‘was no metaphor, but an actual cult-utensil, probably a wooden wheel hung up in the temple and consulted as oracular, being made to revolve by means of a rope’.¹⁶ The earliest reference to Fortune's wheel in Roman literature is Cicero's In Pisonem, xxii, which describes a man who, while dancing naked at a feast, ‘ne tum quidem fortunae rotam pertimescebat’ (‘had no fear of the wheel of Fortune’). After Cicero, Fortuna's association with a revolving wheel (rota) can be traced chronologically through Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, Horace, Seneca, Pliny, Fronto, Ammianus Marcellinus, and Claudian, to Boethius,¹⁷ whose De consolatione philosophiae (a.d. 524) was, in C. S. Lewis's words, ‘one of the most influential books ever written in Latin’, its Book ii containing ‘that great apologia for Fortune which impressed her figure so firmly on the imagination of succeeding ages’.¹⁸

Howard R. Patch points out that of all the pagan deities, Fortune was ‘the only one to survive the change in religion with the advent of Christianity’.¹⁹ To a large extent that survival owes itself to Boethius's Consolatione, whose impact on medieval thought in general, and on the development of the medieval concept of Fortuna and her wheel in particular, cannot be overestimated. As Patch observes elsewhere, all the details of the conventional portrait of Fortune in medieval literature find their beginning in the Consolatione: ‘One cannot hope to stop her wheel; if the goddess cease to be fickle, she ceases to be Fortune; she puts one up, another down: ideas like these in great number were first expressed for the Middle Ages by Boethius, and then passed round in common currency.’²⁰ The fact that Boethius's writings influenced the intellectual development of practically every thinker of account in the Middle Ages helps explain the consistency which will later be observed between the Boethian concept of Fortune's wheel and Cervantes's use of the windmill image to embody it.

A most remarkable aspect of Boethius's theory of Fortune and her wheel is that he retained his belief in her despite his adherence to the Christian doctrine of an all-embracing, providential God. In so far as the concept of Fortune assumed the existence of a force outside God's purview, the conventional position of the Church fathers from Lactantius and Augustine to Aquinas was to deny her reality and regard her works as illusory. Although Augustine, as a pagan philosopher prior to his conversion, had accepted Fortune as an indispensable idea, he had to abandon that notion after his conversion.²¹ As Aquinas would do after him, he appropriated a modified form of Aristotle's thesis that chance is necessary to allow room for free will, and he found fortuna a useful term for the Aristotelian notion of causa per accidens. But, as Patch points out, both Augustine and Aquinas definitively rejected the goddess figure and affirmed that what may seem to occur by chance, in actuality has its own proper cause.

Boethius was the first and most important of those writers who, adopting an attitude of compromise between the pagan view of Fortune as an independent ruling power, and the Christian view of Fortune as a power completely subservient to another God, retained both Fortune and divine providence without trying to demonstrate how they could coexist in one and the same cosmos.²² Counter-balancing the view expressed in De civitate dei, he bequeathed to medieval historiographers, even one as late as Boccaccio (1313-75) in his De casibus virorum illustrium, the theory that political history is a cycle consisting of the rises and falls (casus) of kings and dynasties.²³ Although one literary tradition after Boethius describes Fortune as seated upon the wheel and suffering its revolutions, another much more common tradition, one with roots in Classical literature, depicts her as seated or standing beside the wheel and turning it, usually by hand.²⁴ The latter tradition, to which Boethius adhered, places human beings upon the wheel which Fortune turns, so that some of them fall while others rise.

This image fosters two prevalent motifs in medieval and Renaissance literature, poetry, and art which recur in the Quijote's windmill episode. The first motif, the roe-boe rhyme, plays on the wheel's most remarkable stunt, which is to spin a man from the top to the bottom. Perhaps its earliest example occurs in Alexandre de Bernay's Li Romans d'Alixandre (twelfth century), where we are told: ‘Sire, mains gentius hom seoit ier sor la roe, ❙ qui por le votre mort est ceus en le boe.’²⁵ Lending itself to a convenient rhyme in Old French, the common motif of a man being cast from the top of the wheel (roe) into the mud (boe) is directly related to another theme: the so-called ‘formula of four’. This theme is manifest wherever a writer or artist depicts Fortune, usually with a solemn face, turning her wheel with one king sitting atop it and uttering regno (I rule); a second king falling off one side of it, uttering regnavi (I reigned); a third king rising on the other side, uttering regnabo (I will reign); and a fourth king crushed beneath it, uttering sum sine regno (I am without reign). That this theme was still current in Spain less than a hundred years before Cervantes began the Quijote is shown by the illustration of Dame Fortune, the wheel, and the four kings, with the tell-tale phrases inscribed above them in Castilian (reino, reine, reinare, sin reinoso) on the title page of a Spanish edition of Boccaccio's Cayda de principes (De casibus virorum illustrium) printed at Toledo in 1511.²⁶

Medieval and Renaissance allusions to Fortune and her wheel are so numerous that it would be a vain task to try to determine all sources through which Cervantes became familiar with those images.²⁷ Yet certain general surmises may be made. To begin with, it may be assumed that he knew Boethius's account of them in the Consolatione, the first of whose several Spanish translations had been written in the fourteenth century.²⁸ Given the tendency among certain medieval authors, such as Pier della Vigna, Johannes of Dambach, Albertano of Brescia, and Alberto della Piagentina, to be prompted by their own Boethian sufferings in prison or exile to compose imitations of the Consolatione,²⁹ it even seems plausible that that book's sober contemplation of Fortune's fickleness and her wheel's instability would have specially attracted Cervantes, a man who had experienced bondage both as a slave for five years in Algiers, and as an internee in a Spanish debtors' prison on at least one later occasion.

Aside from the discussion of Fortune in the Consolatione, Cervantes might well have been impressed by such later references as the one to Fortune's ‘changes’ in Dante's Inferno (‘Le sue permutazion non hanno triegue’ (Canto vii, line 88)), which he certainly knew, and the one to her wheel in Orlando Furioso (‘la ruota instabile’ (xxxiv, 74)), a work whose hero the Manchegan knight is fond of citing (Quijote, i, Chapters 13 and 25; ii, Chapter 40). But more important than any specific allusions must have been the overall impression made on Cervantes by the pervasiveness of the Fortune theme in the particular literature of which his novel is in part a satire. The Quijote parodies a body of late Spanish chivalry books that are more or less direct descendants of the earlier Arthurian Grail romances, which one scholar collectively describes as ‘a clear case of “fortune” narrative’.³⁰ Indeed, in one well-known Middle High German text of that genre, Wirnt von Grafenberg's Wigalois (composed 1204-1210?), the titular hero becomes so closely identified with his benevolent destiny (diu sælde or diu sælicheit) that he takes on its symbol, the rota fortunae or gelückes rat, as his heraldic bearing and chivalric title: ‘The Knight of the Wheel’.³¹

In addition to chivalry books, Fortune's wheel figures crucially as a structural device in at least two other bodies of Spanish literature that greatly influenced Cervantes. With Love and Time, Fortune manifests itself as a definitive thematic convention of Renaissance pastoral poetics, as exemplified by Cervantes's own La Galatea (1585) and certain other representative sixteenth-century texts of that genre.³² At the same time, Fortune's wheel has been shown to play different functional roles in the composition of at least three Spanish works of the previous century which are often compared as progenitors of the novela sentimental: Juan Rodríguez del Padrón's Siervo libre de amor (1439-40), which ‘places man at a central juncture of Fortune's wheel with a real choice of following either a road to destruction or a road to salvation’; Diego de San Pedro's Cárcel de amor (1492), which ‘places man in an irreconcilably chained position on the perimeter of Fortune's wheel, with no real choice but to make his inevitable destruction coterminous with his salvation’; Fernando de Rojas's La Celestina (1499), whose protagonists ‘are chained together on the rim of Fortune's wheel’, so that when one falls off, ‘the others inevitably fall in swift consequence’.³³

In the Quijote's windmill episode, the wheel of Fortune plays yet another functional role. Appearing there in the form of the windmill, it is attacked by the knight, whom it thwarts, and the whole encounter anticipates the circularity implicit in his oscillation between good fortune and bad from that point on. But before I pursue this thesis through a consideration of the text, the historical question must still be addressed: how and why would the windmill as a technological device have come to be associated with Fortune's wheel?

The earliest reliable report concerning the existence of a windmill, one located in Asia, dates from about a.d. 947, and the earliest known reliable testimony to one situated in western Europe dates from about 1180.³⁴ Since it was from about 1190—only a decade later—that the image of Fortune with her giant wheel and four figures of kings became ‘fairly frequent’ in the work of European artists,³⁵ and since images of windmills subsequently began to appear in literature and art,³⁶ it seems plausible that the kinship between Fortune's wheel and the windmill could have been apparent from the end of the twelfth century.

Any windmill, regardless of its type, shares at least two characteristics with Fortune's wheel: its sails revolve around an axle like a wheel, and its movement is determined by a fortuitous force, the wind, which was conventionally associated with Dame Fortune from Pindar onwards through the Renaissance. In addition, windmills and Fortune's wheel had in common their sheer physical immensity. In the words of one molinologist, ‘the sails of the windmill constituted a wheel of spectacular size, even by modern standards. Turning briskly in a fresh breeze, they formed a dramatic focus of interest in a static landscape, and the working mill dominated the countryside for miles around’.³⁷ That such a huge, windblown, turning wheel would eventually be linked with Fortune's wheel in Le Mireour du monde (quoted earlier), and again, several centuries later in the Quijote, seems no less natural than the speculation by one historian of art and literature that ‘the monumental Wheel Windows of medieval churches and cathedrals (Amiens, Beauvais, Basel etc.) probably soon came to be recognized as Wheels of Fortune, [even though] the earliest, Beauvais (about 1160), clearly had originally another subject’.³⁸

The earliest known references to the existence of windmills in Spain occur in two poems, one dating from between 1203 and 1493, the other, from 1330.³⁹ In the landscape of La Mancha, where windmills may have first appeared in 1575, or perhaps earlier, during a period of great drought between 1505 and 1545,⁴⁰ they were well-known fixtures by the time Cervantes wrote the Quijote, to whose eighth chapter—as one windmill aficionado puts it—‘deben los Molinos de Viento su renombre universal’.⁴¹

According to Howard Mancing, the windmill episode, the first witnessed by Sancho Panza, provides the paradigm for Don Quijote's other adventures. While Mancing traces a decline in Don Quijote's enthusiasm for chivalry through his subsequent adventures on the basis of their decreasing conformity to ten criteria for quixotic adventure established in the windmill episode,⁴² the windmill's role as a satiric embodiment of Fortune's wheel has yet to be demonstrated.

One point worthy of consideration here is that, to be safe from the suspicion of Church authorities, authors writing in Spain and elsewhere during the age of the Inquisition had to be cautious about how they employed the term fortuna. As Américo Castro points out, the Congregation of the Index outside Spain censured Montaigne, Lipsio, Machiavelli, and Giordano Bruno for saying that the world is governed by the blind force of fate and for abusing the word fortuna.⁴³ In this light, without having to accept fully Castro's well-known view of the Quijote's author as a kind of closet free-thinker who protected himself against the possibility of ecclesiastic censure by concealing his (allegedly) liberal attitudes on religion and philosophy behind a veil of hipocresía, one may understand why Cervantes would introduce Fortune's wheel as an operative force in his story not in its literal form but, rather, in the innocently ambiguous but unforgettable guise of a windmill mistaken for a giant by a madman.

To anyone familiar with the conventional concept of Dame Fortune, as Cervantes could have assumed most of his contemporary readers to be, Don Quijote's special vulnerability to the dangerous revolutions of her wheel would seem to stem from the motive that impelled him to sally forth as a knight: his desire to reap ‘eterno nombre y fama’ (i, p. 20). From Book ii of Boethius's Consolatione to Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (xxxiv, l. 74) and Chaucer's Hous of Fame (iii, l. 1547), fortune and fame are consistently associated, and that association carries with it an ominous implication. From the maxim of Tacitus in his Agricola to Milton's allusion to fame as ‘that last infirmity of noble mind’, there is a recurrent notion that—in C. S. Lewis's words—‘nothing so much beguiles those who have some natural excellence but are not yet perfected in virtue as the desire for fame’.⁴⁴ As documented by such historiographical works as Boccaccio's De casibus virorum illustrium, those who are beguiled by fame often find themselves cast off by the centrifugal force of Fortune's wheel, the victims of tragic falls. Something of this sort is precisely what happens to the Manchegan knight in his conflict with the windmill.

Fortune's crucial role in that episode and, indeed, throughout the novel, is suggested by the first words Don Quijote utters to his squire upon spotting thirty or forty windmills on the plain and mistaking them for monstrous giants whom he must engage in battle: ‘La ventura va guiando nuestras cosas mejor de lo que acertáramos a desear’ (i, p. 43). However, Fortune (here, ventura) is not the only supernatural force to which he alludes on this occasion; as he states at the close of the same sentence, the reason he wants to annihilate the giants (windmills) is that to do so ‘es gran servicio de Dios’. From here on, until Don Quijote admits the omnipotence of divine providence and denies the existence of Fortune following his defeat by the Knight of the White Moon late in Part ii, God (or cielo, heaven) and Fortune will be cited by characters and narrator alike as forces of practically equal power in their governance of human actions and events.⁴⁵ In this respect the Quijote is reminiscent of Boethius's Consolatione, whose more serious narration, while seeming to remain ambivalent about the precise relationship between those two forces, moves from an early emphasis on Fortune in Book ii to a grand defence of Providence in the fifth and final book. (Since Don Quijote and Sancho are never severely injured and do not die in action, the Boethian perspective of course loses much if not all of its tragic bite in the Quijote; indeed, by linking the theme to such a humorous pair this novel gives Fortune's wheel a comic spin!)

Fortune's all-important bearing on the windmill episode is again hinted at when Don Quijote, in response to Sancho's attempt to persuade him that what he sees as giants are actually windmills, quips that the peasant is clearly not ‘cursado en esto de las aventuras’ (i, p. 43). What is most ironic about this quip, and the knight's repeated insistence in the next line that the windmills are giants, is not his misperception per se, but rather, his use of the word aventura, which here denotes ‘adventure’, as it does repeatedly elsewhere in the Quijote, but which also happens to be the archaic term for ventura.⁴⁶ Thus, while professing a knowledge superior to Sancho's in the business of aventuras, the knight remains unaware that he is about to attack—and become the victim of—an embodiment of Ventura's wheel.

The windmill's specific function as Fortune's wheel begins to become clear as Don Quijote prepares for battle despite his squire's repeated protestations. When a slight breeze (‘un poco de viento’ (ii, p. 44)) springs up—putatively by chance—and sets in motion the windmill's vanes, which the knight misperceives as the arms of the ‘giants’, we at once conjure the image of a huge revolving wheel driven by the wind's fortuitous force. Considered in connexion with the regno-regnavi theme, a variation of which emerges in what happens next, the arrogance Don Quijote betrays in challenging the mills as ‘cobardes y viles criaturas’ who flourish ‘más brazos que los del gigante Briareo’ (i, p. 44) does not bode well for him. For, according to medieval belief, Fortune's wheel holds sway not only over the worldly affairs of individual human beings but also over their spiritual condition. In congruence with the Judeo-Christian principle that pride cometh before a fall, ‘a figure might be filled with pride at the top of the wheel, but later at the bottom feel correspondingly humble, the two estates of pride and humiliation being caused by the frame on which he is turning’.⁴⁷ The actual account of Don Quijote's tilt gives this medieval notion a new twist, presenting the spectacle not of the prideful man being toppled from the reigning position atop Fortune's wheel, but rather, of his attacking the wheel itself and being immediately repelled:

Pidiéndole que en tal trance le socorriese, bien cubierto de su rodela, con la lanza en el ristre, arremetió a todo el galope de Rocinante y embistió con el primero molino que estaba delante; y dándole una lanzada en el aspa, la volvió el viento con tanta furia, que hizo la lanza pedazos, llevándose tras sí al caballo y al caballero, que fué rodando muy maltrecho por el campo.

(i, p. 44)

As a variation on the medieval ‘formula of four’, this scene introduces a fifth figure to the conventional scenario. In addition to the four kings whom the tradition depicts respectively atop, below, climbing up, and falling off Fortune's wheel, we now have the would-be knight who, consistent with the Quijote's reputation as the prototype of the novel as a subversive genre,⁴⁸ attacks the whole rotating structure from the front. Although neither fortuna nor ventura occurs as a term in the description of the attack, Fortune's active role is implicit in the blowing of ‘el viento’ as it was also several lines earlier in the ‘poco de viento’. It could even be argued that the chief victor in the battle is not the windmill or its vane, but rather, Fortune, who through her traditional agent, the wind, provides the force that turns the vane (‘la volvió’) at the fateful moment.

The spectacle of Don Quijote and Rocinante being sent ‘rodando muy maltrecho por el campo’ after their clash with the vane calls to mind the roe-boe rhyme, which, as already discussed, pictures the unlucky man cast off by the centrifugal force of Fortune's wheel into the mud. Unlike the regnavi figure in the ‘formula of four’, Don Quijote was never atop the wheel of Fortune (or windmill) to begin with. Yet his attack upon it leads him to suffer an identical misfortune—that is, a rough fall off the wheel to the ground. Hence, when Sancho rushes to his assistance and finds Don Quijote unable to move as the result of the impact of his fall with Rocinante (‘tal fué el golpe que dió con él Rocinante’ (i, p. 44)), we are reminded of two other closely-related Fortune motifs. Given Rocinante's involvement in the knight's tumble, the first motif is the image of the unfortunate rider who, in the manner of the anti-king Tancred as presented in Peter of Eboli's Sicilian Chronicle (c. 1197) and in numerous medieval pictures, is thrown by his stumbling horse and ends up writhing in the dust, his plight resembling that of ‘the king “without kingdom” or “crushed beneath the wheel” of the typical Wheel of Fortune’.⁴⁹ The second motif, which became linked in the Middle Ages with such figures as Job, Jeremiah, Isaiah's Suffering Servant, and the Man of Sorrows (and would have plagued the mind of anyone who pondered the theme of Fortune's wheel with its four kings) is the image of the wretch sitting on a wayside in his misery, the laughing-stock of passers-by.⁵⁰

The windmill episode is not the first to end with Don Quijote being found by another character while lying on the ground, unable to move, after tumbling with his horse as the result of an accident effected by chance. In his adventure with the merchants of Toledo (Part i, Chapter 4) luck (‘suerte’) caused Rocinante to stumble and fall as Don Quijote charged one of the traders, with the following result: ‘Cayó Rocinante, y fué rodando su amo una buena pieza por el campo; y queriéndose levantar, jamás pudo’ (i, p. 32). After then being beaten by a muleteer, he was left lying helpless on the ground, where he was subsequently found and assisted by a peasant from his village who showed up by chance (‘quiso la suerte’ (i, p. 33))—just as he is later aided by Sancho while unable to rise from the ground after the windmill incident.

How might the parallels between these two episodes bear on the windmill's connexion with Fortune's wheel? Given the parallels, we should not be surprised to find the fortuna theme in the windmill episode further illuminated by another work whose unmistakable kinship to the Quijote's first several chapters, particularly the one recounting the Toledan merchants episode, has often been remarked: the anonymous little theatrical piece Entremés de los romances (known in English as the Ballad Farce), which was first published in 1613 in Madrid, but whose author and date of composition remain unknown. It tells the story of a poor peasant, Bartolo, who goes mad from his excessive reading of the Romancero, as did Don Quijote from reading chivalry books; ludicrously, he is set on imitating the knights of the ballads. Bartolo's rantings and the mishaps into which they lead him are uncannily similar to those of Don Quijote in his encounter with the merchants. Having gone insane and become a knight, he intervenes on behalf of a shepherdess who is quarrelling with her shepherd lover; but the lover seizes the madman's lance and beats him to the ground with it, just as the muleteer abuses Don Quijote with the knight's own lance. Finally, sprawled similarly on the ground and unable to rise, Bartolo, like Don Quijote, blames his horse for his bad luck, and quotes aloud the same self-pitying verses from the popular ballad, ‘Marqués de Mantua’, as does Don Quijote.

Only one passage from the Entremés concerns me here, the first words Bartolo utters as he lies prostrate on the ground after his beating:

¡Ah cruel fortuna, proterva!
Apenas puedo moverme:
¡Contenta estarás de verme
Tendido sobre esta yerba!(51)

Disregarding the long-debated but unresolved question of whether the Entremés was composed before or after the Quijote's first part, and of whether Cervantes or someone else was its author, I presume that whoever wrote it would have deemed Bartolo's complaint to Fortune a verse that no less befits Don Quijote in his helpless condition following either the muleteer incident or his tilt against the windmill.

The account of Don Quijote's defeat by the windmill conforms so closely to such basic Fortune themes as the wheel topos, the fortuitous blowing of the wind, the roe-boe formula, the motif of the rider on a stumbling horse, and the image of the fallen wretch at the wayside, that it becomes almost impossible not to view the windmill as an embodiment of Fortune's wheel. Since fickleness and change are among Fortune's most notorious hallmarks, it seems appropriate that the initial excuse Don Quijote offers his squire for his defeat by the mill before blaming it on enchantment is that the affairs of war are governed by continual fluctuation (‘continua mudanza’ (i, p. 44)). Accordingly, the knight later makes reference to one of Fortune's other major traits, its tendency to deceive its victims, when he tries to account for his confusion during his nocturnal encounter with the water-powered fulling mills (in Part i, Chapter 20). Having been incited by the sound of their pounding hammers to pursue an illusory adventure in the dark before realizing what they were, he afterwards blames Fortune (la ventura) for ‘engañándonos con los batanes’ (i, p. 105).

The assumption that Fortune's wheel and Fortune's wind are implicitly operative in the windmill episode, even though neither is referred to there by name, finds support in several explicit allusions to those images later in the Quijote. (Indeed, were Cervantes's fondness for both images not so clearly evidenced by these later allusions, one might argue that we were simply reading the concept of Fortune's wheel and wind into the windmill episode.) Thus, the narrator of ‘La novela del curioso impertinente’ (Part i, Chapter 34) employs the phrase ‘volvió Fortuna su rueda’ (i, p. 208) to explain how the hoodwinked Anselmo finally learned of his wife's infidelity. And not only does Sancho, as already quoted, at one point describe Fortune's wheel as turning faster than a windmill, but also, in later urging that Quiteria should marry the man she loves rather than the man with money, he asks rhetorically whether there is anyone who can boast of having driven a nail into Fortune's wheel (‘echado un clavo a la rodaja de la Fortuna’ (ii, p. 397)). At the same time, following their beating by the Yanguesan horse-drivers, Don Quijote exhorts his disheartened squire to believe that ‘el viento de la fortuna, hasta ahora tan contrario, en nuestro favor se vuelve’ (i, p. 74). Much later, Sancho adopts this notion when, in trying to persuade his wife of the merits of his setting out on a second journey with his master, he asserts that one should know how to ‘gozar de la ventura cuando le vien’ and concludes: ‘dejémonos llevar deste viento favorable que nos sopla’ (ii, p. 338). Since the outcome of the first of Don Quijote's adventures witnessed by Sancho was decided by a fortuitous gust of wind, it is noteworthy that immediately after Don Quijote's defeat by the Knight of the White Moon, which puts an end to his chivalric career, we are told that Sancho sees all his own hopes as a squire swept away like smoke before the wind (‘como se deshace el humo con el viento’ (ii, p. 597).

If the windmill against which Don Quijote tilts embodies the wheel of Fortune turned by Fortune's wind, it is easy to fathom why Cervantes placed that episode at the very beginning of the knight's first journey with his squire. As the novel's most memorable image, the giant windmill with its revolving vanes encapsulates the pattern of circularity that characterizes not only Fortune's wheel but also Don Quijote's whole career as a knight. The novel opens with his lapse into madness, and closes with his repossession of sanity. For each of his three sallies from home, there is a return home, and throughout his career victories are followed by defeats, which are in turn followed by more victories and defeats. Don Quijote himself alludes to this circularity of fortune when, in discussing the published account of his own achievements with Sansón and Sancho, he asserts that ‘no hay historia humana en el mundo que no tenga sus altibajos’ (ii, p. 330). Although Don Quijote is referring here to the specific ups and downs suffered by Sancho during his famous blanketing at an inn (Part i, Chapter 17), the term altibajos would aptly sum up the whole course of the two characters' adventures together. The circularity of their fates might even help explain why this novel has been viewed as comic by some readers (focusing on the ups), and as tragic by others (focusing on the downs).

It may be concluded that the windmill episode occurs at the outset of the knight's first journey to alert the reader to the structural and thematic role which the image of Fortune's wheel will play throughout the novel. In fact, if the verb ‘to reign’ in the ‘formula of four’ were to be replaced with ‘to be a knight’ the entire novel might be summarized as, among many other things, the account of one man's revolution around Fortune's wheel. In the opening chapter, as a reader of chivalry books aspiring to be a knight, the hidalgo would appear on the wheel's ascending side, expressing: I will be a knight. From the second chapter to at least the end of Part i, as a madman imagining himself a knight, Don Quijote would appear atop the wheel, expressing: I am a knight. When he begins to doubt his knighthood, perhaps as early as the opening of Part ii or the encounter with the ‘enchanted Dulcinea’ (Part ii, Chapter 10),⁵² and definitely after his defeat by the Knight of the White Moon (Part ii, Chapter 64), he would appear on the wheel's descending side, expressing: I was a knight. In the final chapter, where he regains his sanity and renounces chivalry, Alonso Quijano would appear beneath the wheel, expressing in no uncertain terms: I am not a knight.

Anyone still sceptical about the bearing of the regno-regnavi theme on the Quijote should consider the even more obvious parody of it in the subplot of Sancho's quest to become governor of an island. Following Don Quijote's promise of a governorship to him during their first dialogue (Part i, Chapter 7), and the knight's reiteration of that promise on a number of later occasions (for example, Part i, Chapter 30; Part ii, Chapter 3), the peasant-squire entertains a constant dream corresponding with the aim of the regnabo figure ascending Fortune's wheel. When he assumes the rulership of a farcical province granted him by the Duke and Duchess (Part ii, Chapter 45) he incarnates a comical version of the regno figure enthroned atop the wheel. But later, after ‘falling’ in a mock battle and abdicating his rule (Part ii, Chapter 53), he comically conforms to the images of the dethroned regnavi figure cast off from the wheel, and the sum sine regno figure crushed beneath it.⁵³

By the time Don Quijote meets his final defeat on the Barcelona beach, both he and Sancho have taken a full spin around Fortune's wheel, the one in pursuit of chivalric dreams, the other in quest of a governorship. It thus makes perfect sense that they have Fortune on their minds as they begin their homeward journey (Part ii, Chapter 66). Serving as a kind of epitaph to their whole career together, their brief but remarkable exchange on the subject of Fortune as they depart from Barcelona completes a circle back to the image of Fortune's wheel embodied in the windmill early on. When Don Quijote turns to gaze at the spot where he fell, and laments how ‘aquí usó la fortuna conmigo sus vueltas y revueltas’, Sancho responds by citing his own misfortune as fallen governor (‘si cuando era gobernador estaba alegre, agora que soy escudero de a pie, no estoy triste’) to support his own view of Fortune as ‘una mujer borracha y anojadiza, y, sobre todo, ciega’, who ‘no vee lo que hace, ni sabe a quién derriba, ni a quién ensalza’ (ii, p. 600). However, Don Quijote dismisses his squire's conventional medieval notion of Fortune. Utterly humbled by his defeat, the melancholy knight who once cockily attacked the wheel of Fortune in the form of a windmill now rejects the very concept of her in favour of divine providence, as did Augustine long before him—a step that must have pleased Cervantes's censors!:

‘Muy filósofo estás, Sancho’, respondió don Quijote; ‘muy a lo discreto hablas; no sé quién te lo enseña. Lo que te sé decir es que no hay Fortuna en el mundo, ni las cosas que en él suceden, buenas o malas que sean, vienen acaso, sino por particular providencia de los cielos, y de aquí viene lo que suele decirse: que cada uno es artífice de su ventura.’

(ii, p. 600)⁵⁴

Notes

1. Miguel de Cervantes, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (Mexico, D.F., 1981), Part ii, p. 329. All further textual references to Don Quijote are to this edition. For my English paraphrases I have consulted the Ormsby translation of Don Quixote, edited by Joseph R. Jones and Kenneth Douglas (New York, 1981).

2. See Walter Nigg, Der christliche Narr (Zurich, 1956), p. 257.

3. For example, Charles V. Aubrun, ‘The Reason of Don Quixote's Unreason’, translated by Louise K. Wornom and Ellen Lempera, in Critical Essays on Cervantes, edited by Ruth El Saffar (Boston, Massachusetts, 1986), pp. 60-66 (p. 63); Ruth El Saffar, ‘In Praise of What is Left Unsaid: Thoughts on Women and Lack in Don Quijote’, Modern Language Notes, 103 (1988), 205-21.

4. See Dominique Aubier, Don Quichotte, Prophète d'Israël (Paris, 1966), Chapter 10, ‘Des moulins sans mystère’.

5. See Arturo Marasso Rocca, Cervantes (Buenos Aires, 1947), pp. 19-20.

6. See Francisco Maldonado de Guevara, ‘Molinos de viento, tres meditaciones’, Anales Cervantinos, 4 (1954), 77-100 (p. 77).

7. See Ann Livermore, ‘Cervantes and St. Augustine’, Month, 212 (1961), 262-63.

8. See William Avery, ‘Elementos dantescos del Quijote’, Anales Cervantinos, 9 (1961-62), 1-28.

9. Américo Castro, ‘Incarnation in “Don Quixote”’, in Cervantes Across the Centuries: A Quadricentennial Volume, edited by Ángel Flores and M. J. Bernardete (New York, 1969), pp. 146-88 (p. 153).

10. Castro, p. 154.

11. Emile Mâle, The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century, translated by Dora Nussey (New York, 1958), p. 97.

12. Mémoires et documents, Societé d'histoire de la Suisse romande, Volume iv, Le Mireour du monde, edited by Félix Chavannes (Lausanne, 1845), p. 67. The passage I quoted is incorrectly cited by Mâle, who attributes it to the Somme le roi (p. 95 n. 4), which was compiled in 1279 by the Dominican Friar Laurent for Philippe III of France. Le Mireour du monde is related to the Somme le roi, but is much longer. It was widely translated (for example, into English as Ayenbyte of Inwyt (‘Remorse of Conscience’) and printed by Caxton as The Book Ryal or the Book for a Kyng (1481)). I did not find the sentence about Dame Fortune in the section on pride in the Ayenbyte. (I have not checked Caxton or any of the other translations.) The Somme was also translated widely, including into Catalan and Spanish. It may be that those translations contain the passage about Dame Fortune. But it does not seem to be in Laurent's 1279 original.

13. See Diccionario enciclopédico de la lengua castellana, compiled by Elías Zerolo and others, fourth edition, 2 vols (Paris, n.d.), s.v. ‘fortuna’.

14. The most thorough study of the distinction is Vincenzo Cioffari's Fortune and Fate from Democritus to St. Thomas Aquinas (New York, 1935).

15. See David M. Robinson, Pindar, A Poet of Eternal Ideas (Baltimore, 1936), p. 51; and his ‘The Wheel of Fortune’, Classical Philology, 41 (1946), 207-16 (pp. 207-12).

16. A. B. Cook, ‘Zeus, Jupiter and the Oak’, Classical Review, 17 (1903), 403-21 (p. 421). For a full discussion of Fortune among the Romans, see Howard R. Patch, The Tradition of the Goddess Fortuna in Roman Literature, Smith College Studies, 3 (Northampton, Massachusetts, 1922), pp. 131-77.

17. See H. V. Canter, ‘“Fortuna” in Latin Poetry’, Studies in Philology, 19 (1922), 64-82 (pp. 77-78), and Robinson, ‘Wheel of Fortune’, pp. 212-14.

18. C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge, 1964), pp. 75, 81.

19. Howard R. Patch, The Goddess Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature (New York, 1967), p. 3.

20. Howard Rollin Patch, The Tradition of Boethius: A Study of His Importance in Medieval Culture (New York, 1935), p. 96. Compare pp. 121-22.

21. See Augustine's De civitate dei, Book iv, Chapter 18, where he discusses Fortune and Felicity, and Book v, Chapter i, where he argues that the greatness of the Roman Empire is neither fortuitous (fortuita) nor fatal (fatalis), but rather, the necessary result of the order of divine providence.

22. See Patch, Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature, pp. 17-35.

23. See F. P. Pickering, Literature and Art in the Middle Ages (London, 1970), pp. 169-91.

24. See Patch, Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature, pp. 152-54.

25. Cited from the Michelant edition, page 522, lines 2-3, by Patch, Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature, p. 160. The development of this motif is traced by S. L. Galpin in ‘Fortune's Wheel in the Roman de la Rose’, PMLA, 24 (1909), 332-42 (p. 334). For other examples, see Patch, Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature, p. 160, n. 1.

26. See James P. R. Lyell, Early Book Illustration in Spain (New York, 1976), p. 93, fig. 73. For earlier illustrations see Patch, Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature, pp. 60, 164, and plates 10 and 11; Pickering, Literature and Art, p. 190, n. 1, and plates 1b, 2a, 2b.

27. In addition to Patch's Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature, especially Chapter 5, ‘Fortune's Wheel’, see Von A. Doren, ‘Fortuna Im Mittelalter und in der Renaissance’, in Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg, 2 (1922-23), 71-114; K. Weinhold, Glücksrad und Lebensrad (Berlin, 1892).

28. See Patch, Tradition of Boethius, p. 65.

29. Patch, Tradition of Boethius, pp. 97-98.

30. Pickering, Literature and Art, p. 192.

31. See Wirnt von Grafenberg, Wigalois, The Knight of Fortune's Wheel, translated by J. W. Thomas (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1977), especially pp. 29-38.

32. See Pilar Fernández-Cañadas de Greenwood, Pastoral Poetics: The Uses of Conventions in Renaissance Pastoral Romances—‘Arcadia’, ‘La Diana’, ‘La Galatea’, ‘L'strée’ (Madrid, n.d.), pp. 109-12.

33. See Colbert I. Nepaulsingh, Towards a History of Literary Composition in Medieval Spain (Toronto, 1986), pp. 192, 194.

34. See Jannis C. Notebaart, Windmühlen, der Stand der Forschung über das Vorkommen und den Ursprung (Paris, 1972), pp. 372, 378.

35. See Pickering, Literature and Art, pp. 206, 214.

36. For example, Boccaccio describes some of his young storytellers strolling toward a windmill (mulina) that is blowing in the breeze in the conclusion to the fourth day of the Decamerone, while the famous ‘Windmill Psalter’ (East Anglia, late thirteenth century) is named after the windmill pictured at the top of the illustration of the initial ‘E’ on the Beatus page. See Pickering, Literature and Art, plate 9b; Robert G. Calkins, Illuminated Books of the Middle Ages (Ithaca, New York, 1983), pp. 214-25.

37. John Reynolds, Windmills and Watermills (London, 1970), p. 91.

38. Pickering, Literature and Art, p. 218.

39. See Notebaart, Windmühlen, pp. 193, 367-68.

40. Notebaart, p. 196.

41. Gregorio Prieto, Molinos (Madrid, 1966), p. 21.

42. See Howard Mancing, The Chivalric World of ‘Don Quijote’: Style, Structure, and Narrative Technique (Columbia, Missouri, 1982), pp. 46-48.

43. Américo Castro, Hacia Cervantes (Madrid, 1960), p. 195, n. 3. For an instance in La Diana where the author (Montemayor) apparently alters his argument regarding fortune to protect against the possible attack and censure of the Index, see Fernández-Cañadas, Pastoral Poetics, pp. 111-12, 112, n. 20.

44. Lewis, The Discarded Image, p. 83.

45. For example, in recounting the serendipity by which he came across Cide Hamete Benengeli's Arabic manuscript of Don Quijote's history, the narrator acknowledges that he would never have discovered it ‘si el cielo, el caso y la fortuna no me ayudaran’ (i, p. 49). Later, shut up in a cage on an ox-cart, Don Quijote confides to Sancho his hope of becoming a king of some kingdom, ‘favoreciéndome el cielo, y no me siendo contraria la fortuna’ (i, p. 293).

46. The etymological kinship of these two terms accounts for the humorous error the housekeeper makes when she communicates to Sansón Carrasco her suspicion that Don Quijote is going to escape for a third time ‘a buscar por ese mundo lo que él llama venturas; que yo no puedo entender cómo les da este nombre’ (ii, p. 343). As Jones and Douglas remark in their note to Ormsby's English rendering of this passage, venturas, which the housekeeper mistakes for aventuras, would mean ‘strokes of good fortune’ (Don Quixote, Ormsby translation, p. 457, n. 1).

47. Patch, Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature, pp. 170-71.

48. See, for example, the introduction to and Chapter 1 of Frederic R. Karl, The Adversary Literature: The English Novel in the Eighteenth Century. A Study in Genre (New York, 1974).

49. Pickering, Literature and Art, p. 201. See plates 3a, 3b, 4b.

50. See Pickering, p. 204.

51. Entremés de los romances, in Varias obras inéditas de Cervantes, edited by Adolfo de Castro (Madrid, 1874), p. 159. Reprinted in Cuatro entremeses atribuidos a Miguel de Cervantes (Barcelona, 1957).

52. See Mancing, The Chivalric World, Chapters 3-5; Salvador de Madariaga, Don Quixote: An Introductory Essay in Psychology (London, 1961), especially pp. 146-85.

53. In accordance with the roe-boe motif, Sancho's figurative ‘fall’ from power is reinforced by the physical falls he suffers in the process. Bound between two shields, ostensibly for protection during the battle, he eventually ‘fué dar consigo en el suelo tan gran golpe, que pensó que había hecho pedazos’ (ii, p. 544). Later, on his way back to the ducal castle, he is caused by ‘su corta y desventurada suerte’ (ii, p. 551) to fall into a pit with his donkey, whom he then bids: ‘pide a la fortuna … que nos saque deste miserable trabajo’ (ii, p. 552).

54. I should like to thank Jan M. Ziolkowski for referring me to several of the studies on medieval literature cited in this article.